Lecture: Jeffrey Ahlman, "W. E. B. Du Bois's The Negro and the Promises of African History"

This lecture explores The Negro (1915) in the development of Du Bois’s intellectual and political relationship to Africa. In doing so, it presents the book as a transitional text in his career that not only exhibited his budding personal interest in Africa, but that also reflected his growing desire to transform narratives of past African civilizational accomplishments into a re-reading of the history of the modern world.